My Personal Zero Moment: How I became a writer

Today, I joined the diy MFA Book Club. Run by writer Gabriela Pereira, the Book Club is a way to improve your writing through regular prompts, work as part of a community of writers, and grow your audience.

The first prompt arrived a short while after I joined and starts like this,

How did you become a writer, word nerd?

Gabriela explains her own 'zero moment' when she first started writing at school after her teacher became aware of her love of books.

"I fell in love with writing because I loved reading. It was my love of literature, of getting lost in a story, that pushed me to put pen to page in the first place. I suppose that's why they say all writers must be readers first. I know it was this way with me."

Now it's my turn to share. Here goes.

How I became a writer

To understand how I became a writer, you first have to understand the home I grew up in. 

An only child, born to parents who were the age of most of my friends' grandparents, I grew up in a house of books. 

My father's books included play scripts, history books, and whatever non fiction publications caught his eye. My mother loved novels, mainly thrillers, but on occasion the kind of fictional life drama that pits an individual against dire circumstances.

I was an early, quick and greedy reader. I had my own bookcase in my bedroom. My parents filled it with fairytales and children's classics (I distinctly remember an ancient hardback copy of Peter Pan) but I would read these books as quickly as they landed on my shelves. 

I don't know whether it was to avoid buying more books for me, or just to put a stop to my nagging, but my mother very quickly allowed me to accompany her to the local library. At the door, she would hand my library card to me (I seem to remember it was a denim blue colour) and then we would part. She would disappear into the fiction aisles and I would head for the children's section.

Our village library was small, and so the amount of books it could hold was limited. Luckily though, the children's section was repopulated with new books on a regular basis so I never bored of what I found there. 

I wasn't really into picture books, even when I was of the age they were aimed at. I always liked the colourful covers but I think they just weren't long enough to hold my attention. I could read nine or ten of them in the time it would take me to select five precious paperbacks to take away with me.

Back home, I would dive into my chosen fictional worlds and before a couple of days was up, long before I was due to return to the library, I would have finished them all.  

I was an avid, deeply involved reader. The writer part came a little later.

I was eight years old and heading home from school. Normally, my mother would have collected me but today I'd been told to meet her at the hairdresser in the village. 

The path outside the primary school was narrow, single file width, but I was in a hurry. The quicker I got to the hairdresser, the more likely my mother would be to buy me some sweets from the newsagent on the way home. 

Two boys from my school barred my way with their slowness. I asked to get by. They smirked and continued to shuffle. I stepped out onto the road.

My next memory was a couple of weeks later. It took that long for my mind to recover from the car that slapped my body against the wall of my school building. My body took longer. I spent Christmas, New Year and my birthday in hospital while my broken arm, fractured pelvis and the golf-ball sized lump on my fractured head healed.

The first few weeks of my stay in the Victoria Ward were spent in bed, surrounded by a huge metal frame with weights that nearly every visitor knocked their heads on. There was a 'cage' support over my legs to stop the sheets dislodging the massive scabs on my legs and the tops of my feet from the wounds there. My right arm, elbow to knuckles, was encased in plaster. I was a bed-locked prisoner.

My parents visited me every day but for the most part it was me and my friends, a handful of children who were also patients on the ward. Still, being bed-bound, and I wasn't the only one of the children who couldn't leave their beds, there was only so much playing that we could do.

Once I'd read the books my school and parents had brought me (my first introduction to Roald Dahl), I was left twiddling my thumbs, well, just the one. I was bored, and as my hospital friends mostly left the ward to go home, I began looking for something to do.

We had a teacher who would visit us occasionally on the ward. I vaguely remember learning about 1066 and Henry VIIIth. When my parents found out about this, and that there would be lesson plans to fill out, they brought in some pencils and a pad. 

With my right arm in plaster, it was impossible to use that hand, so I began to write with my left hand. The result was scrawly and all over the place, but it was still writing.

I wrote about the children on my ward. I wrote a letter to my favourite teddy bear. I wrote a list of what was in my bedroom. It didn't matter what it was, any old rubbish, I wrote it down just the same. If I didn't have enough to read, I wrote myself a story.

When I left the hospital, my mother said I was a different person. I was. I wasn't her cossetted, spoilt little girl anymore. I'd learnt independence. I'd learnt what it was like to be away from home. I'd met some adults who weren't trustworthy and whom we kids had had to look after each other against. I'd come to appreciate how lucky I was to have loving parents and a home to go back to. 

And I had become a writer.